About a month ago, I started exploring how to setup an online store to accept Bitcoin. I looked into various frameworks and webservices that I could use. Then it hit me how simple it is. You don’t need any of that. You need two or three things, with the third being optional:

(1) Basic, self-hosted code to create a wallet address for a customer’s transaction.

(2) Run your own node that you can query to see that an invoice got paid to the above address.

(3) Access to a public/paid API to query for a realtime Bitcoin exchange rate, so you know how much to set the invoice for, if you want.

That’s pretty simple, I think.